Bennett Parten > Quotes

“If slavery rested on a “geography of containment,” as Stephanie Camp has argued, the ability to move was thus a building block of freedom.”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“the ability to migrate and determine one’s way in the world, to reconnect with people or a place, and, just as important, to feel free, to feel as if no longer constrained by either a master or a plantation.10”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“Sherman’s March has been remembered mostly as the campaign that conquered the South, but the underlying battle between soldiers and enslaved people was what gave the March its most profound meaning.”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“You cannot solve this negro question in a day.”27”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“It also reinforced what for Hitchcock had been an ongoing realization: the war, he knew, needed winning, but to really defeat the Confederacy, slavery would have to die, two things that were not necessarily the same. One would simply put down a rebellion; the other would cut the rebellion off at its root. One could potentially retain the status quo; the other would remake American society by removing its most malignant tumor. As Hitchcock sat, stared into the fire, and listened to the stories of the men and women Cobb had enslaved, it was a distinction that had never been so clear to him.53”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“If they want peace, they & their relations must stop war,”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“Scholars sometimes see this attachment to the army as a form of “social citizenship” in action—the idea that individuals build citizenship from the ground up by placing demands on a state or state institution—and maybe it was, but it also boiled down to the fact that following the army provided them with a basic sense of protection.”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“To place the campaign into this context is to finally understand the March for what it was: one of the most active, concentrated, and robust reimaginings of freedom in all of American history.13”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“Slavery,” he said, is “receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent.”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“Traditionally, we’ve only ever seen the March as a military campaign. What we’ve missed is that Sherman’s army cut a path through the state of Georgia wide enough for freed people to begin putting the pieces of freedom together.”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“Freedom, in a word, was family. It was Ben and Sally escaping to Atlanta and then making the March in the hope that they might reconnect with Nan, their long-lost daughter. It was the woman who begged the soldiers to let her follow them to Savannah so that she could find her husband and children, whom she had been sold away from many years before. And it was the woman who, a soldier wrote, had been “gone with grief going on four years” after seeing her son sold away and wanted to follow the army to Macon so that she might see him again. Family was a major part of how freed people envisioned freedom, and because of the March, reunions now suddenly seemed possible.9”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“The freed people of Georgia thus tell us something about the nature of freedom and what it meant to those navigating the uncertainties of emancipation: it’s that freedom was never any one thing; rather, it was an “open-ended process,” as the historian Eric Foner wrote, of attaining the things slavery had long denied them. To place the campaign into this context is to finally understand the March for what it was: one of the most active, concentrated, and robust reimaginings of freedom in all of American history.13”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“I can make the march and make Georgia howl.”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“Glory be to God, we are free!’ ” recalled James M. Simms, a formerly enslaved person born in Savannah and once a pastor of the First African Baptist Church of Savannah, the first black Baptist congregation in North America.”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“Cobb’s power seemed to put the entire Confederate project into perspective, revealing in the starkest of terms the moral emptiness in the idea of a slaveholder’s republic.”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“The freed people of Georgia thus tell us something about the nature of freedom and what it meant to those navigating the uncertainties of emancipation: it’s that freedom was never any one thing; rather, it was an “open-ended process,” as the historian Eric Foner wrote, of attaining the things slavery had long denied them.”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“Sherman conducted the March and orchestrated the army’s movements, but he couldn’t control it. No one could. The collective force of an army that size moving at that speed made it impossible to police or contain. That was why at some point the March ceased to be a standard military campaign and took on all the attributes of a social convulsion.”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation

“His home and store happened to be in the same building as the old A. Bryan’s Negro Mart turned schoolhouse, which meant that before the war he had spent his nights listening to the cries of enslaved men and women on the verge of being sold. “It was hell, sir!” he told Charles Coffin, who took a shine to Houston and his story. “The wailings of the damned can never be more heart-rending,” he added, noting that the worst was hearing mothers cry for their lost children and listening as traders shuffled bonded men and women up the stairs, their chains clanking as they went.40”
― Bennett Parten, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation